


primaries, and a couple others

by thumbipeach



Category: Purple Hyacinth - Ephemerys & Sophism (Webcomic)
Genre: Angst, F/M, I’m ascending from the depths of hell to bring you, Slow Burn, hey y’all, incomprehensible nonsense noises, someone should tell me that writing a 3k oneshot instead of doing schoolwork is irresponsible
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-15
Updated: 2020-10-15
Packaged: 2021-03-08 20:07:16
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,802
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27032404
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thumbipeach/pseuds/thumbipeach
Summary: The human brain cannot comprehend excess unity, just as it cannot rationalize catharthic complexity.True harmony is dynamic equilibrium, only achieved by the work of two opposites with no business trading in the fragmented territory of hue.True harmony is a raging battle for equality(Lauki Week, October 15th—Colors)
Relationships: Lauren Sinclair/Kieran White
Comments: 20
Kudos: 57





	primaries, and a couple others

He has become _infuriating._

He was _always_ infuriating, she supposed, so that wasn’t really fair. But ever since her unprompted tie to his existence, characterized by a red lie of their amity, he’s become more so. It increases as the days pass, rises like ferocious bile in her chest.

“Need I try to find your favorite color through threats, or will you just bite the bullet and tell me?”

This is said as she hucks bluebells at his feet, falling amongst yellowed parchment that towers in alphabetized scrutiny. Lauren laughs, threading her hands through her hair.

“You’re going to have to keep guessing, _darling.”_ She bites out, resisting the urge to grind her heel into the flowers and turn them to azure pulp, and maybe press the residue to the shine of his polished shoes, as well.

She’s started calling him darling, and the switch would almost hurt, if not for the twinge in her chest at the delicious way he flinches. Maybe she derives some satisfaction from doing it, and perhaps it’s not her due to say she’s okay with that.

_“In a relationship—“_ he starts, tilting his head and displaying a row of shined teeth, hair falling over his eyes in black tendrils.

“—communication _is_ key.”

Time stills for just a moment, and in the blue he creates there is only silence, cold water surfacing. She can pinpoint the exact moment his eyes turn sharper, duller, as he realizes that out of the many lines they've drawn between them, he’d picked this one to cross when they were alone together. 

“Oh?” She purses her lips like a dove would in consideration, her eyes very wide as she closes the distance, fingers twitching in spasmodic rhythms. They ache, ache like bruises at her neck, and she hears the crunch of dried leaves as she steps over autopsies and seasonal reports to reach him.

“You want to talk to me about _communication?”_ She hisses, and she can see him swallow under his oppressive collar. 

If she’d been with him in a better location, perhaps she’d be able to watch his collar shift in fear, would have had the chance to skirt her fingers at his pulse point and _tug._

Instead she simply sidles very close, hands clasped behind her back, innocent like a flowering daisy. If Kym were to walk in, she’d scream in mock scandalization at their positions, but the huntress cares not for the whims of anyone other than her prey.

“Lauren—“

“I don’t know, darling—“ she smiles, like a hyena’s sneer, pretty pink lips pulled with puppet strings at the very tips. “—I like keeping you on your toes. Keeping you guessing.”

She smiles, languidly, like she would in the morning light, soft and almost gentle. 

“Not knowing when I’ll betray you.”

He sighs in something hedging on regret, breath ghosting over her, and it makes her shiver. It’s icy and cold and _blue,_ and she hates him so. 

_“Maybe—“_ she purrs, pulling back and inspecting the bluebell froth under her nails. “—I’ll do my best to derail you in some way, and you’ll understand.”

His fingers find purchase at a book spine behind him, and as his ex-partner—now his girlfriend, he guesses—turns, flips her rosy hair behind her shoulder and steps out, he manages some pathetic words from the pages.

“Understand what, _mon amour?”_

She barely glances back as she trails blue at her feet.

“That I’ll hurt you in tandem. Anything you have, I have too.” She grins at him, like he’s the damn canary with his feathers between her teeth.

_“That’s_ how our relationship works.”

And so he is blue, cast in dust motes and fragments of the past, as she closes the archive door.

When she emerges, Kym waits with a smug smile and a hand thumbing her suspenders.

“So? I can see you enjoyed his gift,” she says, and points to the bluebell still in her fingers, her stunted composure and messy bangs.

Lauren smiles with a clarion calm she would never be able to feel again.

“Sure. It was nice of him.”

Kym laughs. “He has charm!”

“I suppose.”

———

And yet, he still tries to guess.

The pink azaleas do no good, as do the yellow daffodils. He doesn’t dare give her anything purple—he’s trying to set her off, bit by bit, not get _killed_ before he can do it himself.

Every day a new flower is at his favorite officer’s desk, and every day, after faking her gushing and her flushed cheeks, she looks him dead in the eyes and tosses it in the dustbin. They’ll surely start to smell, if she’s not careful about it. He considers swathing them in resin, so they’ll remain ever-permanent reminders of his pathetic narcissism, of his near desperation.

“It can’t be yellow.” He whispers in her ear as she passes him. The daffodil has recently been the one designated to the garbage, and damn, he’d really thought he’d pinned her finally. When he thinks of her he thinks of yellow amongst other things, betrayal and lost friendship and the taunting ring around a bruise too far gone to be healthy.

“I should have known—your pensive eyes provide that for you already.”

“I won’t tell you even if you get it correct.” She says back, her form tensing at his husky voice in her ear. 

He senses his unwelcome, drawing back and collecting himself, but she’s gone by the time he musters up the courage to speak again. Yellow sears to his chest, leaves him breathless and heaving with sunlight.

“I’ve never heard her say.” Kym laments when Kieran dares to try and ask. He frowns. 

“Are you trying to find out?” Kym cooes. “She’s being mean, huh?”

_“A bit more than mean.”_ He mutters, but shakes his head despite it, retreating dutifully.

He deserves it, the chase. He doesn’t know why he tries so. 

Perhaps it’s the resolve of a lion who hasn’t given up on its lost prey.

Perhaps it’s the pathetic attempts of a man who messed up.

Who is he really, to say that they aren’t the same?

The next day he tries a lighter shade of yellow in the form of an iris, and she looks like she’s close to grinding it in her teeth. 

“Are you as passionate about me as your bodies, darling?” Sounds like a song in the quiet din of a back alley, smoke billowing in the form of life cast in frost.

He relents for a few days.

———

There are moments in life when recognition and comprehension fail. In the bosom of the morning, when you wake and see only hazy lightning, or when one laughs a little too hard, and your stomach and throat constrict with unadulterated happiness.

Now, slammed into a brick wall, Kieran’s head shatters for a brief second, into a kaleidoscope of color.

_“Do you understand—“_ she yells, “ _that I don’t want you talking to them?!”_

He laughs harshly, trying to see beyond the specks of red and yellow and blue and everything that clouds his vision and leaves him breathless, a fraction of himself. Somewhere, a holster is pressed in a ringlet against his head, but he doesn’t feel like listening, the primaries in his life contracting into perfect triangles.

“You can go on _taunting_ me, pretending and digging us further into this _grave_ you’ve started, but don’t for a _moment_ think that it allows you to endear yourself to my friends.” 

Kieran nods, face uncharacteristically bleak. “You needn’t worry— **I don’t really want to, anyway**.”

She gasps, and he bites his tongue. Can’t he keep his damn mouth shut?

“It’s only for their sake that I’m not going to _break_ your _damn_ bones,” she snarls, and if he’d only look up he’d see red blood, blue thread and coarse, honey yellow staring him down like he’s a carcass, decomposing in soft light.

“You think you’re anything more to me than a _coward?”_

He looks up sharply as she laughs, throws back her crimson head and takes his composure, what little he has left to spare, what little he hadn’t already given her.

“You hide, Hyacinth—you hide and hide and then you take, all _purple—“_

“Hm.” He hums, hoarse and raspy, drawing up to his full height. He still towers over her, hair whipping in the dregs of wind that coast through Ardhalis’ alleys, bringing with it the smell of death and life both, a balance tense with frugal meaning, like their own.

“So—purple _really_ isn't it, huh?”

She stops.

The way she looks at him—he wonders why he’s the one who stands as an assassin, when she could easily overcome what cowardice he has sewn into his bones.

Then, she turns around, heels pivoting like the axis of a churning wheel.

“What would make you think that?”

He doesn’t really have an answer, and as she walks away from him, he starts to understand, blood swathing her fingers.

She’d rip him apart, and all that would be left is a kaleidoscope of random shapes, congealing into his saturated existence. 

———

The red is when it starts to cave.

It’s such a contrast to the stale white of her paperwork that it edges on pure emphasis, the way the rose kills her over and over and over.

It’s like giving a gift of silk to a textile crafter, like trying to sell wine to a drunkard. She _is_ red, all it is, all the danger and horrible pangs of hunger and blood, so why would he think—?

Slowly, she takes the rose in her fingers and inspects it. Holds it up so it catches the light, and the edges that are thinner than the center turn into a veneer of scarlet.

“ _He gave you a rose?”_ Lila asks from the front desk, her varnished fingers at her lips. She smiles so warmly it increases the temperature tenfold, and Lauren _almost_ feels guilty for what she’s about to do.

Lukas grunts. “Roses are overrated. Get them some poison ivy, it makes things interesting—“

Lila pouts, clearly defensive. “Stop that! They’re pretty—it doesn’t matter how overused. It doesn’t diminish their beauty and meaning!”

Lukas’ eyebrows raise, mildly abashed—or as much as Lukas Randall _could_ look abashed. “You think so?”

“They’re a classic!” Kym shrieks from an elevated somewhere yonder, and Will’s indignant protests for them to return to work are drowned by the ensuing debate of which flower is the most romantic.

Amongst them is Lauren, their words like water in her ears as she looks at what that infuriating, impossible, horrible, monster of a man gave to her.

Monster, monster—monsters give red roses and call it love, because it’s the only way they apologize for their bruises and their purples, their horrible experimentations, their mutations.

And so, slowly, lethargically, like a widower in moonlight, she brings her fingertips, charred with blue and purple and yellow, up to the thinnest petal, fringing on the outside of the whorl, and _rips._

The soft sound attracts no attention at first; only when she does it again, again, and again, the red petals falling around her desk like blood spurts, does everyone slowly trail their thoughts into nothing, staring at her as she destroys the flower. Lila and Kym look on in mild alarm; even Lukas and Will look startled.

The red girl, the one with purple under her eyes and around her neck and in her bleeding red heart, picks and picks until only one petal is left on its stem, which breaks off in due course, fluttering like a forgotten spell.

When she’s done, she calmly drops the stem, looks up at the assembled company, noting their startled and confused faces, and smiles very brightly.

“He loves me not,” she shrugs. “Rats.” 

When nobody says anything, she laughs callously, rubbing the back of her neck in clockwork rhythm, a rhyme that cannot be repeated, feeling for purple, his necklace.

_“_ **_He does give better jewelry, don’t worry.”_ **

———

It happens by accident.

She spits up lamplight from the streets, tries to follow his shadowy form as they retreat from the damp, musky streets of Greychapel. Her hat lies low over red, near black eclipsing crimson, and her honey eyes follow him as he dances the line between predator and prey.

“Well—“ Kieran says, leaping onto the banister of the bridge like he did eons ago, in a different life, when harmony wasn’t so imminent, or so discordant.

“This was an unsuccessful week.”

She resists the urge to sigh irritably. “For you? Sure.”

“Hm.” He nods his head, thumbs reaching up to whip his own cap off his head, and she watches as his hair tumbles down, much like the bluebell day in the archives, and his masks with it. She can only see his back from where she’s rooted to the ground, but she can feel the way his shoulders drop slightly, the way his face slackens into insecurity. She is attuned to him, irritatingly, more than she’d like to be.

“I still haven’t figured it out.” He says, so soft she couldn’t have caught it in the quiet buzz of night, if not for her attention, her guards and hackles ever-raised.

“What?”

He half turns, heels arcing on chocolate stone. “What your favorite color is.”

She scoffs, breath ghosting in the January atmosphere. She’s so _tired._ She wishes she could fall and sleep forever, white silk trapping her legs in spider cobwebs.

He throws up his hands. “It’s infuriating—you don’t seem to accept a thing! How it hurts.”

“I’m _infuriating?!”_ She grits out, hands in her pockets to hide her bitten, painted fingers from the chill.

He turns over his shoulder to look at her briefly, his eyes calmer than they should be under the weight of her words. She _hates_ how he acknowledges her, how he blindly trusts that she’ll hurt him, because it becomes harder to do.

“No. You’re not.”

_It’s because they’re coming from you, and I hate you,_ she wants to say. But he doesn’t deserve that kind of validation, so she doesn’t say anything.

“I mean—“ he leaps off the bridge, kicks his feet to hide the press of his lips. “I’m taking shots in the _dark_ at this point.”

_Continue. I won’t give you a single damn thing._

“For all I know it could be horrific, like chartreuse or _puce_ or something—“

_Shut up, shut up, shut up. You’ll never own me or have me or want me enough for this. Stop, stop, stop—_

“Ha!” He laughs suddenly, bending down quickly and picking something from a copse of grass left by the streetlamp. Her brows furrow, and she dares to draw closer, boots muffled by frost and chill as she hesitates forward. Kieran leaps up, holds something out to her, his eyes not meeting her own—

“For all I know it could be—“ he holds up the offending daisy, a chuckle rasping in his throat.

_Stop._

She does.

Perhaps it’s the way she freezes violently, the way her eyes flash burning yellow and her hair rages a fire, for he stops too, attuned to her like only a kaleidoscope of color can be, shifting into fragmented extremes. 

“Do you—“ 

She stares at the daisy, at its perfect furl and simple pleasure.

He looks down.

“You like white.”

It’s a statement, one she can’t contradict, because somehow he’s always right, even when he lies to her.

And the infuriating monster, the belligerent man she has to call her boyfriend, but who is actually her other half, the plaster of vigilantism masking the hopeless criminal, he laughs like the day is at its apex again.

Kieran White, he laughs, because her favorite color is ivory and pearl and a blank slate. Because her favorite color is the white of a daisy and flecks of hair and a life lived in such static to be a different one than the one Lauren Sinclair lives. Because her favorite color is white.

“Oh, _Sinclair—“_

Nothing compares to it, the way he says her name, and the colors of the world shift as though she herself has been pressed into an unforgiving death.

“—if I had known, I would have done it ages ago.”

He smiles, a genuine smile, and she hates him, really, he is horrible.

“Done what?” She breathes, not daring.

He looks at her for a time.

When he can’t produce an immediate answer, she walks forward, forward, past him, towards the black edges of the city, towards the end of the world, on the other side of her compliment.

Lauren hears it when she’s too far away for him to run after her.

_“I would have stayed away.”_

So all it takes is disorganized equilibrium, to bring them hurtling towards harmony.

  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> *drives up on a motorcycle, tilts sunglasses* it’s britney, bitch ✨
> 
> I’m back very briefly hello hello! I wasn’t planning on this, evidently, but I wanted to participate in Lauki week 👉🏽👈🏽
> 
> As always comments/kudos are bluebells! Love you all, thanks for being so patient with me <3
> 
> Insta: @artsofisha
> 
> -thumbipeach


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